Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

The intellect cannot do the work of the imagination; the emotions cannot do the work of the imagination; and neither of them can do anything much in fiction without the imagination.

No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it.

Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself.

If the attempt to provide a structure that will ensure communitas is impaled on the horns of its own dilemma, might one not abandon the machine model and have a go at the organic—permitting process to determine structure? But to do so is to go even further than the Anarchists, and to risk not only being called but being in fact regressive, politica

The attempt to play complicated music on an instrument which one hasn’t even learned the fingering of is probably the commonest weakness of beginning writers.

We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something.

That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic

The “secret” is skill. If you haven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets. In a fairly simple art, such as making pie crust, there are certain teachable “secrets” of method that lead almost infallibly to good results; but in any complex art, such as housekeeping, piano-playing,

Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in origin, an artifact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story.